


Footsteps to a slope

by Lilliburlero



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Corpses, Gen, Gossip, Stillbirth, Suicide, Unreliable POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-16 21:34:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7285552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mrs Theobald pieces together some particularly sensational local gossip.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: mention of suicide, stillbirth, dead bodies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Footsteps to a slope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



Mrs Theobald was not sure of her information. She had the bulk of it from Clive, a circumstance without precedent, for her husband was both unnaturally indifferent to and forgetful of local news: she had never really been able to impress upon him how much an invalid’s social life depended upon these tidbits. Clive had heard it from Dr Lowe, whose ultimate source was Mrs Clare, who in addition to native lubricity had every reason to wish to deflect attention from herself.

It perturbed her to think that Mrs Cotter might carry away an erroneous impression: owing no doubt to a defective and rustic education, she was imperceptive to nuance and a trifle garrulous. Mrs Theobald made quite sure, with elaborate disclaimers, that no fault could appertain to her if an unwarrantedly lurid account entered circulation. 

‘—well, my dear, with all that said, as far as I understand it, what Nurse Price told you was only _half_ of the story; exactly half, if you take my meaning.’ 

Mrs Cotter’s beady eyes widened but remained blank. 

‘It was not,’ Mrs Theobald pronounced, maintaining her dignity in the presence of a naïveté that obliged her to distasteful bluntness, ‘only Mrs Clare who was involved.’ 

Mrs Cotter’s open mouth reminded her friend of the guinea-pig she had, in her earliest girlhood, raised by hand. 

‘Oh, the poor, poor boy,’ she said. ‘And his poor mother.’ 

Mrs Theobald turned her palms upward, smoothing the duck-egg satinette of her counterpane with the backs of her hands. She lowered her lashes and shook her head sadly. Even worldly pride on the Luciferian scale of Elaine Fleming’s could not be said to deserve such a terrible retributive visitation, but she couldn’t help feeling that Mrs Cotter, in her simplicity, had rather missed the point. 

‘It’s very upsetting to think one’s most intimate details have resided in the hands of a person so—I don’t use the word lightly— _depraved_. Indeed, that those sordid hands have been laid upon oneself—’ Overcome, she gestured weakly at the bottle of eau de cologne on the bedside table. ‘If you could just—yes, on the hanky there.’ 

‘Oh, of course.’ Mrs Cotter gave her the scented handkerchief. She dabbed her neck and forehead. 

Recovering, Mrs Theobald continued, ‘I forgive Clive completely, of course. He was comprehensively deceived. I did mention it—but it’s clear to me now that she had started to work upon him quite soon after she arrived, and men are so blind to guile. Oh, the very thought of her, sitting there in his study, talking about my case! It makes me feel quite faint.’ 

‘Don’t distress yourself. I’m sure you can tell me when you’re feeling a little stronger. Let’s talk about something pleasant instead.’ 

‘There’s nothing I would like more,’ Mrs Theobald said bravely. ‘But we oughtn't to bury our heads in the sand. We must face up to the dangers to which we’ve unwittingly exposed ourselves, otherwise how are we ever to prevent it happening again? Of course, if you don’t think you can stand to hear it—’ 

‘Goodness me. I hadn’t really considered—but when you put it like that I think maybe I should. A trouble shared and so on.’ 

‘I think of it more as a responsibility, really. A duty of care. Do open those chocolates if you’d like. It was so sweet of you to bring me your own favourites.’ 

Mrs Cotter undid the ribbon, lifted the lid and offered the box. Mrs Theobald unerringly selected the coffee cream heart, remarking, ‘You like peanut cracknels, don’t you?’ Mrs Cotter, who did not, obediently took one. 

‘Well. What makes it all so very unpleasant is that she was here that very day.’ Mrs Theobald shuddered and nibbled her chocolate. 

Silenced by a disagreeably brittle mass of nutty fragments that she was anxious to ingest without either indecorous crunching or injury to her soft palate, Mrs Cotter produced an expression of pleading concern that further deepened her resemblance to the long-deceased Ginnykins. 

‘And then, later that afternoon, they were—’ Mrs Theobald hesitated, thoughtfully consuming the remains of her coffee cream, because her informant for this detail was her charwoman, whose niece was a waitress in the Crown, and she mistrusted the capacity of working people to distinguish bad behaviour from the merely dashing and offhand. But, she thought, gathering heart, if even a servant was scandalised, there could be no doubt it was truly disgraceful. ‘She and the boy were carrying on quite flagrantly at the window-table in the Crown Hotel. If it had ended there, I declare I should have thought it a _ruse de guerre_ —or _d’amour_ , seeing as all’s fair in both—’ 

She waited patiently, and Mrs Cotter’s abashed titter eventually struggled through lacerating confectionery. 

‘Yes, one can imagine the appeal of a maternal type like Mrs Clare to an immature young man, but as for—’ 

Having solicited it, Mrs Theobald decided that this observation was in poor taste, and said in a very gentle, understanding fashion, as to a child who has made some vivid exhibition of innocent candour, ‘Well, that’s quite immaterial now.’ 

Mrs Cotter blushed. ‘Yes, of course—it’s so unspeakably ghastly, I don’t think I’ve quite taken it in. It doesn’t seem real.’ 

‘Anyway, gossip must have reached his mother by that evening, you know what the village people are, because they quarrelled, and he flew straight up to tell the two of _them_ that all was known. Except only Mrs Clare was at home; _she_ was on a house call. I daresay it turned somehow into a very vulgar display of jealousy, because he stormed out and—well, the whole district knows where he ended up.’ Mrs Theobald arranged her hands in a vaguely prayerful attitude and her face in an expression of conventional grief. 

‘In the mean time _she_ returned, and what passed between those women it’s simply beyond me even to imagine.’ (She had, nonetheless, been interrupted in the attempt by Mrs Cotter’s arrival.) ‘But _she_ followed him—’ 

Mrs Cotter, having recovered somewhat from her encounter with the peanut cracknel, began to assume a look of stern disapprobation, but Mrs Theobald was prepared for that. 

She countered, ‘It’s so queer, isn’t it, that in the most incorrigible personality might be found that spark of goodness that proves there is hope for us all? I’m sure some—most people, perhaps, will interpret her actions very cynically, and say I am a trusting fool, but I’d _rather_ believe it was an act of mercy, wouldn’t you?’ 

‘Oh, oh yes. I was just thinking the very same thing—’ In her confusion, Mrs Cotter snatched convulsively for another chocolate, alighting this time on a tenacious and glutinous toffee. 

‘Going down into that horrible place, and at night, even if one’s feelings are unutterably coarsened by such a very physical profession—’ Mrs Theobald let out a small, modulated shriek. ‘And to actually see a person, even a stranger, but someone one knows—’ 

Though Mrs Theobald’s sensibilities were far too fine even mentally to supply the indelicacy of ‘in the biblical sense’, Mrs Cotter’s were not. But in any case the ribaldry was wholly driven from her mind by appalled memory. 

‘But she didn’t—’ she spluttered through her mouthful of sweet. To her entire mortification, yellow-brown droplets of spittle described a lazy, slow-motion parabola in the air, landing on the blue sheen of the counterpane. She plucked at the handkerchief in her cuff, then concluded it would perhaps be best if she were to pretend something so humiliating had not happened at all. 

‘Whatever can you mean?’ Mrs Theobald’s voice, aiming for crisp disdain, emerged shrill and aggrieved. 

Mrs Cotter swallowed the remaining clot of caramel. ‘She didn’t. See, I mean. Horace and I were picking up the car from the garage and—’ In her excitement at contributing new and succulent intelligence she forgot the usual euphemisms. ‘I overheard the eldest Mott boy, he works there three days a week, say the most peculiar thing. I hadn’t connected it, you see, because it was before it came out about—what happened to _him_ , and I didn't know _she_ had been there at all. Now, I must get this right.’ She paused and frowned. 

Mrs Theobald twisted the counterpane and her lips in agitation. 

‘Yes, that was how it went,' Mrs Cotter recollected carefully. ' _She_ came up to the farmhouse—after—afterwards, covered in mud and looking like a drowned rat, practically gibbering. She’d got there just in time but too late, if you get me.’ Remembering Dan Mott’s words stripped her accent of a layer of genteel patina, and she went on, ‘P’raps a strong man might have had a chance at putting a stop to it, though at the risk of going with him, but never a woman. So she tried to shock him out of it, or into thinking he'd done it when he hadn't, by switching off the lights, but it didn’t answer. So,’ she said, her voice quavering as it returned to a self-consciously schooled cadence, ‘she didn’t _see_ , but she must have _heard_.’ 

The vertical creases around Mrs Theobald’s white, pursed mouth looked like runnels in limestone. 

‘I don’t believe it,’ she declared, sounding at once robust and hollow. 

‘But why would Dan Mott make it up? And something else—I thought at the time he was just telling some local superstition to a visitor—he said until they got her warmed her up a bit and gave her some brandy she was quite delirious, and she kept mumbling that she wasn't the Madonna, just a witch at the crossroads, one of three, or something similarly nonsensical—a nice, ordinary boy like Dan wouldn’t invent that.’ 

Mrs Theobald's spongy skin tautened across the unemphatic structure of her face. She looked plain, angry and more vital than she had in years. Her enervated, delicate manner forgotten, she turned her head with brusque decision to glare at her guest. 

‘Oh—oh, do— _shut up_ , you—you stupid, stupid, _witless_ woman!’ 

Mrs Cotter blinked and looked about her, as if she had just emerged into the light. ‘I’m sure there’s no call for—’ 

Mrs Theobald reached with a rigid, automatic gesture for the handbell. ‘Please, don’t let me keep you.’ The consonants clicked tinnily, like a model railway's points changing. 

When Mrs Cotter had gone, fidgeting her indignation and affront about her shoulders like the cardigan of a twinset, Mrs Theobald looked down disgustedly at the counterpane, minutely soiled with dots of chocolatey saliva. She recoiled into her ribbon-threaded, lace-trimmed cushions and bolsters, not with her customary feeble resignation, but genuine exhaustion. Her pulse was still racing, and more than a glimmer of perspiration stood on her brow, at the base of her throat, beneath her breasts. Her flesh seemed to hang heavy on her fine bones, as if at any moment her essential self might pull away, transcend its wrapper of muddled tissue. She found she wanted none of her habitual remedies, no comfits or tonics or scents. She closed her eyes, but the terrible image flickered before them still, as if a tiny ciné-projector had been installed in her skull, the undersides of her eyelids serving as a screen, raw and suffused with blood. It showed her Julian Fleming’s Grecian profile, his skin poison-grey and waxen like that of the baby she had not been meant to see before they took him away, his brow crowned with damp, blackening petals. Over him, bending and swaying in grief the more horrifying because it was mute, knelt a heavily-draped figure. If her veil were to be thrown aside, any one of three faces might stare desolate back: the triple witch, dedicate to the crossroads, the cavern and black night.

**Author's Note:**

> #1 in a series of fics inspired by lines of poetry obtained using a sort-of _sortes Virgilianae_ method. Naraht drew the line, 'Thy footsteps to a slope of green access' from Shelley's ['Adonaïs'](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45112), and poor Julian was a goner from there on in, I'm afraid.


End file.
